1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to providing topology-specific information, and more particularly to identifying and using topology codes to store and retrieve pre-computed topology-specific information for a point-to-point network.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
Operation of certain networks requires routing tables. Conventionally, routing tables have been recalculated whenever a network topology was changed. If the number of nodes in the network is very small, then the optimal routing matrix could be computed directly by analyzing every possible routing matrix, eliminating those that are invalid or that would allow deadlocks to occur, and choosing the one with the best statistics (such as minimum hop count or shortest longest path). Optimal message routing matrices for even relatively small point-to-point networks may take hours or more to compute using modern computing equipment.
However, if the number of nodes in a simple graph topology exceeds typically 6 nodes, an exhaustive search would become prohibitively time-consuming. A typical 8-node configuration would require analysis of almost 2 quadrillion matrices. This makes on-demand calculation of routing matrices infeasible in environments where users may change a topology and request a routing matrix for the new topology at will. One approach to solving this problem is to artificially restrict the user to pick a network topology from a small set of several allowed topologies, for which the routing tables are already known/computed. Another approach would be to use faster heuristic rules to compute the routing tables upon request. This might reduce the time required to compute the solution, but such heuristic rules might apply only to a small set of simple topologies, and would not guarantee an optimal solution.
It remains therefore difficult and prohibitively time-consuming to calculate some topology-specific information and hence there is a need for a method of more promptly providing topology-specific information for large point-to-point networks.